Note: This column, the first of a three-part series, was first published seven years ago. It is being rerun for a reason.
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Peter was perhaps the fastest person I knew in high school, but he didn’t do an awful lot of running.
He was also pretty smart, which may explain why he ran so little.
What he did do a lot of was smiling.
Peter and I were buddies back at Bloomfield (Conn.) High School. He was part of a group of friends who did almost everything together, in and out of school. That group — Peter, Neal, Joel, Greg, Kris, Allison, Lori and myself — shared many ups and downs during our high-school years. And I’m ashamed to say that few of us have been very good at staying in touch since our graduation in 1975.
It’s been 11 years since I’ve seen Peter. That’s when I attended my one and only class reunion. But Peter wasn’t there. Instead, he was at home, dealing with a ravaging case of Parkinson’s disease.
Since then, I’ve had fleeting moments of thought about Peter. I can only hope that, if it’s true someone’s ears are burning when you talk about them, Peter’s ears have felt warm a few times. But even if that is true, it’s not enough to fulfill the friendship we once had so many years ago. Sure, many miles and a parade of circumstances — life, in general — has gotten in the way … blah, blah, blah.
Nothing but excuses.
Peter, as I said, could fly when he took to running. He was a skinny high-schooler, but he wasn’t the kind of guy you could pull a stunt on and run away from. He’d catch you before you took your first breath. I found that out a few times.
So eventually we got smart and added Peter to the softball team a few of us had put together, making him a pitcher and lead-off hitter. Peter played a lot of games for the Wildfire team over the course of a few summers, and watching him move around the bases then was probably like watching Brett Gardner or Jose Reyes now.
But for me, Peter’s biggest claim to fame was that he helped me survive trigonometry.
Although I did well in algebra and was a whiz in geometry, that trigonometry kicked my backside from the first day to the last. Peter, who thankfully was in my class, managed to explain triangles and the relationships between their sides and the angles between these sides enough for me to wiggle by. Without him, I never would have grasped the fact that, if one angle of a triangle is 90 degrees and one of the other angles is know, the third is thereby fixed, because the three angles of any triangle add up to 180 degrees.
Sure, seems easy now.
There was one day, however, when Peter and I didn’t see triangle-to-triangle when discussing trigonometry. And as he stood in the cafeteria holding the trig book, he might have called me something derogatory — like hypotenuse face — and I decided to angle my fist toward his chest. But Peter was quicker than I, and he raised the book fast enough so that my fist caught the cover of the book dead center and creased it. We looked at each other and busted out laughing at the fact that his trig book cover was now bent at a 45-degree angle.
The cafeteria was also where our group sat together for lunch, and often had something up our sleeve to keep us occupied. Most times we would play a card game known as “High. Low, Jack and Game.” For some reason, teachers patrolling the cafeteria didn’t mind us playing cards, as long as we were quiet. It was when we didn’t play cards that we sometimes found ourselves at odds with the teachers — like when Peter and I would try smashing the Twinkie that often emerged from Greg’s lunch bag.
And then there was Peter’s car — an old brown Capri that always seemed to be getting fixed, whether it was at his house, at a friend’s house or in the school parking lot. Peter put a lot of time into that car. But I admired him for it, because he HAD a car. I didn’t.
One day, as “the gang” was heading for the beach, Peter’s car pulled alongside the car I was in and, for some reason, we thought it would be cool to pass a bag of chips from one car to the other. Well, the chips ended up getting strewn all over the highway and it’s a wonder the two cars didn’t bump and wreck. We laughed about it then, but I shake my head at it now.
Years later, after most of us in the group had gone to different parts of the country for college and jobs, I heard that Peter had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Since one of our teachers in high school had the disease, and because I’d spent five years as a paramedic after college, I knew all about what Peter’s life would entail. And not long after, it robbed him of his job, his marriage and, to some degree, his spirit.
When I saw him in 2000, the speed was replaced by a snail’s pace, the quick mind seemed slowed and his smile replaced with something less alive.
A handful of months ago, Neal and Kris notified me that Peter was now in a skilled nursing center in West Hartford, Conn., and it has been on my heart ever since that I needed to visit him. So on Sunday, I’ll be headed north for a few days of reconnecting with a past that I’ve let get away from me.
Peter doesn’t run anymore, but neither do I; and I’m sure neither of us can figure out how cosines and secants and polygons all fit together. But one thing remains the same as it was 35 years ago: Peter is still a friend, and I need to tell him that — in person.
Next week: A trip to “back home.”
W. Curt Vincent can be reached at 910-506-3023 or [email protected].
